Acid Row Read Online Free Page A

on the settee in the sitting-room, laughing as her toddlers pressed their little fingers to her tummy to see if they could feel their brother or sister moving. “Ain't they sweet?” she said dropping kisses on to their blonde curls before swinging her legs to the floor and standing up.
    "I'd love a cupsaid Sophie with a smile as she saw two teenage boys pause to gawp through the window at Mel's naked, swollen belly. "You've got an audience," she murmured.
    “I always do,” said the girl, pulling down her top. "You can't get up to nothing in this place without the world and his wife watching."
    Melanie's was one of the in-between houses in Humbert Street which had been divided some thirty years previously to create two maisonettes one at the front and one at the back. A more sensible solution would have been to convert the properties into flats but that would have involved jacking up the facades to create new front doors and installing expensive sound-proofing under the upstairs floorboards.
    Some bright spark at the planning department had come up with a better idea. It would be quicker, cheaper and less disruptive to existing tenants, ran his argument, to divide the houses across the middle with breeze-block walls, fill in the gaps between the houses on either side with new front doors and stairs for each maisonette and utilize the existing corridor, stairwell and landing for kitchens and bathrooms.
    It was an unhappy solution for everyone, creating three classes of tenant in the street. Those, like the men at number 23, who were lucky enough to have a whole house and garden. Those, like Granny Howard who lived in the maisonette behind Melanie, who also enjoyed a full-sized garden. And those at the front, with only a patch of grass and a small wall between them and the road. It had turned Humbert Street into a concrete tunnel, and resentment was enormous particularly among those with no access at all to the gardens at the rear.
    “Is Granny Howard still giving you problems?” Sophie asked, lifting little Ben into her arms and giving him a cuddle as his mother went into the kitchen.
    "Oh, yeah, she keeps banging her hammer on the wall 'cos of the kids'
    noise, but we've given up on the garden. She ain't never going to let them have a bit of a play. My Jimmy had a go at persuading her before he got sent down for the thieving, but she called him a nigger and told him to fuck off. I wouldn't mind so much but it's all weeds out there.
    She don't even go in it herself."
    Sophie ran the back of her hand down Ben's cheek. It seemed crazy to her that the Housing Department should keep an old woman, who never went out, at the back, when two little toddlers who yearned to run and play in safety were confined to the front, but there was no arguing. It was written in stone that Granny Howard had held the tenancy of number 2la since 1973 and was entitled to stay there until she died. "How are you doing on the booze and fags front? Is it getting any easier?"
    “Reckon so,” said the girl cheerfully. "I've got the fags down to five a day, and the booze down to a couple of halves .. . one with my dinner, one with my tea .. . sometimes two. No more binge-drinking though. Given that up totally. I still have the odd joint now and then, but it don't amount to much 'cos I can't afford it."
    Sophie was impressed. The girl had been smoking forty a day at the start of her pregnancy, and the highlight of her week had been to get comprehensively drunk and stoned in the clubs every Saturday night.
    Even allowing for the addict's habit of self-delusion, it was a huge drop which she seemed to have maintained successfully for the last two months. “Well done,” she said simply, sitting down on the settee and making space for Rosie to join her.
    Like Fay, she thought both children in urgent need of a bath, but they were robust and confident toddlers, and she had few worries about their physical or mental health. Indeed she wished that some of her